Like many disabled people, I didn’t immediately have the language or frameworks to understand what was happening, let alone how it would reshape my future as a dancer. What I knew then, and what I’ve carried with me since, is that my dancing body was never just a body- it was, and is, political.
To move through a ballet studio, a theatre stage, or a city street as a visibly disabled person is to challenge the norms those spaces were built upon. These norms- about control, perfection, symmetry, efficiency, aren’t just aesthetic. They’re cultural. They’re systemic. And in the world of ballet, they are deeply embedded.
When I dance now, sometimes with crutches, sometimes leaning into asymmetry, sometimes resting between movements, I am not overcoming disability. I am embodying it. Every choice I make in how I move, pause, or shift weight becomes a way of reclaiming space and challenging what dance, and public presence, is supposed to look like.
My body, in its difference, refuses invisibility. It disrupts assumptions of what ballet can be. And that disruption isn’t just for the sake of it- it’s for liberation. It’s for reimagining spaces where more people can belong.
The studio is not neutral. The stage is not neutral. Neither is the pavement, or the bus, or the boardroom. Each is designed with particular bodies in mind. And access, when treated only as a checklist or compliance box, leaves these defaults unchallenged. But when access is creative, political, and relational, it becomes a tool for re-making those spaces.
When I teach or create work, I’m not just inviting students or audiences into a piece of choreography, I’m inviting them into a different way of thinking about movement, time, and worth. Crip time, for instance, invites us to slow down, to accept that bodies move differently, that rest is part of process. It’s a radical rethinking of who gets to take up space and how.
My dancing body insists on this: that disabled bodies are not only present, but generative. We do not need to be fixed or hidden. We move. We rest. We create. We lead. We belong.
Disability is political because space is political. Performance is political. Whose bodies are celebrated, who is seen as graceful, who is allowed to be public without apology, these are all shaped by power.
So I dance. I teach. I speak. Not because I have something to prove, but because I believe in a world where more bodies can be at home in themselves and in the spaces around them.
My dancing body is political, and in its movement, it opens up new possibilities: of presence, of power, of belonging. This is the lens I bring to every studio I enter, every space I shape, because dance, at its best, is an invitation to remake the world.